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Is "selling their souls" really what they're doing? When writing a new language shouldn't one consider its adoption by the community to be a key part of its suc

Is "selling their souls" really what they're doing? When writing a new language shouldn't one consider its adoption by the community to be a key part of its success? The purist would say all that matters is sticking to a core philosophy while the pragmatist is willing to make some concessions for long-term viability and adoption so long as it doesn't completely undermine the purpose of the language. Essentially, don't you think Hickey, after several failed attempts at writing new programming languages, had given quite a bit of thought about what makes a language successful (and useful) before making the decision to make Clojure JVM based? Of course he did; even explaining the factors that went into the decision. That's not "selling your soul", it's a practical decision that comes from a lifetime of experience.

Chyzwar 10y ago
Because Clojure is not new language it is another Lisp. Language adoption should not be primary driver. Clojure is more Java based than JVM based. This is main issue. It inherits all Java limitations and share problems inherited from Lisp world. https://github.com/clojure/clojure/blob/master/src/jvm/clojure/lang/PersistentVector.java https://github.com/clojure/clojure/blob/master/src/jvm/cloju... By selling soul I mean: 1. Clojure will forever have ugly/broken stacktraces. 2. Inline/Class limits on JVM will not disappear. 3. Half of Clojure libraries are just wrappers. 4. Lack of TCO and other recursions optimisation. 5. Performance will be always worse than Java 6. Type system with garbage in -> garbage out approach